Three British men were indicted yesterday in New York and charged with plotting attacks with "improvised explosive devices and bombs" on several major financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC. Evidently, the leader of the group, Dhiren Barot (among other names) applied to college in New York to avoid suspicion about his frequent trips to the United States, although there are no records that Barot attended any classes or even enrolled at the college once he was accepted. Details of the indictment suggest that the goal of the conspiracy was "to kill as many Americans as possible". Barot, along with Nadeem Tarmohamed and Qaisar Shaffi are accused of collecting video footage of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank headquarters, the New York Stock Exchange, the Citicorp building, and the Prudential building. The men are not specifically accused of ties to al Qaeda, but there is evidence that Barot was the leader of a "jihad training camp" in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Authorities say that the arrests of the men, in August 2004, were inspired by intelligence that suggested the buildings were vulnerable for possible terrorist attacks last summer. This incident, and the countless other arrests of alleged conspirators, suggests much work remains to protect the U.S. from its enemies.

The January/February 2003 issue of The American Enterprise, Homeland Dangers, discusses the past shortcomings of our government's efforts to provide for the common defense. Jane Mack-Cozzo, Nikolai Wenzel, and Michelle Malkin detail the ineffective visa and border security systems that allowed the 9/11 terrorists into our country too easily.  Many of these issues are still a long way from being resolved today.

Welcoming the Enemy
By Jane Mack-Cozzo, Nikolai Wenzel, Michelle Malkin

Joel Mowbray has famously reported on the visa scandal concerning the September 11 hijackers in National Review and on national television. Almost all of the terrorists' visa applications should have been rejected on their face: They were incomplete, incoherent, and nonsensical. The State Department destroyed four of the visas; Mowbray was able to obtain copies of the remaining 15.

This past October, the Center for Immigration Studies sponsored a discussion with Mowbray, Nikolai Wenzel, and Michelle Malkin, to discuss how the terrorists were able to get their visas. Following are excerpts from the remarks by Wenzel and Malkin, who shine the spotlight on the mindboggling security lapses of the State Department and INS. Mowbray's remarks are not repeated here, due to his previous extensive reporting.

Wenzel is a former U.S. foreign service officer. Malkin, the daughter of Filipino immigrants, is a syndicated columnist and author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Malkin was the first to report that the INS had had John Lee Malvo, an illegal alien and one of the two D.C. sniper suspects, in its custody before the shootings, and released him.

Nikolai Wenzel:

The problem of issuing bad visas could happen again--in all likelihood has happened again and probably will happen again. I'm afraid that, based on the bureaucratic nature of the State Department and its systemic problems, I can't deliver much better news.

Joel Mowbray has described 214(b), the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act under which these visas should have been refused. Section 214(b) places the burden of proof on the applicant to overcome the presumption of ineligibility, by showing strong ties to his country of origin. All of these visas should have been refused under section 214(b) of the INA because the applicants did not overcome the presumption of ineligibility. 

If there is a burden of proof on the applicant, there is also an implicit burden of proof on the interviewing consular officer, and therefore on the State Department, to make sure that the applicant actually does overcome the ineligibility. The application forms of these 15 hijackers are incomplete, they are sloppy, they're not properly filled out, they're full of red flags.

If a consular officer in good conscience were to see these application forms, that consular officer should call in the applicant for an interview. I would not even have called in the applicants for interview in many of these cases, because I would have referred them directly to the anti-fraud unit at the embassy. An interviewing consular officer doesn't have time to look at the really bad situations with many, many red flags.

Try this little exercise come April 15: Fill out your IRS tax forms and omit, say, income, or your address, or your Social Security number, and see what happens. All of these visas, most of them glaringly incomplete and nonsensical, were issued without delay. A few of these visas could actually have been issued properly because they were missing only a little bit of information--but only if the consular officer had asked the questions necessary to complete the application.

Admittedly, section 214(b) is difficult. It's subjective. You have two or three minutes, based on a cursory interview, based on a review of documents, to determine if somebody is likely to overstay illegally in the United States or return to his home country. That's a tough decision to make. And, the way the law is written, some bad decisions are unavoidable. Consular officers are not omniscient. They cannot read the minds of the applicants. But they have to rely on interviews, they have to rely on questions, they have to rely on information--which is not what happened in this situation.

There's a pattern. We're not looking at one or two applications that weren't filled out properly and, oops, the consular officer made a mistake. No. These are not isolated individual circumstances, and that's why I do not point the blame at the individual issuing consular officer, but at the system; at the State Department's priorities, at the priorities of issuing visas. This is a pattern of negligence. I call it criminal negligence because it is systemic and, as far as I have seen, universal.

The writing has been on the wall for several years before 9/11. One of the many reasons I left the State Department in 1999 was over disagreement with the Department's interpretation of the law, or, shall we say, application of the law. And now as an economics student rediscovering the joys of mathematics, like to call it the one-over-214(b) argument: that as far as the State Department is concerned, an applicant is eligible for a visa until that applicant proves to the State Department and issuing consular officer that he is not eligible for a visa.

The State Department is in a somewhat difficult situation because it is saddled with the dual missions of diplomacy on the one hand, and law enforcement in the visa field on the other. The two conflict. It's tough to be nice and polite and also say, "Oh no, you can't come visit the United States." And it's always tough for the U.S. ambassador to look the president of a country in the eye and say, "Yes, we are partners of the international scene. Oh, by the way, 80 percent of your country nationals can't enter the United States, sorry."

But due to the bureaucratic priorities of the State Department, Department, it has chosen public diplomacy to the detriment of law enforcement. One half of all the illegal aliens in the United States entered the country on non-immigrant visas issued by the State Department. This is not 5 percent, this is not 10 percent, it's not the odd mistake, it's not a problem with the law being difficult to apply. Fifty percent represents a systematic and systemic pattern of priorities.

My old boss, Tom Fury, who incidentally, and perhaps not coincidentally, was later the consul general in Saudi Arabia when these visas were issued to the terrorists had a favorite saying: "People gotta have their visas."

As far as I have seen, and as far as the General Accounting Office has reported, there has not been a self-assessment within the State Department. Instead, State denies the problem, choosing to blame the messenger, like Joel Mowbray, who was detained at the State Department for asking embarrassing questions.

The State Department will fault intelligence, will fault lack of resources. But you can have all the intelligence information in the world, you can have all the resources in the world, you can have all the money in the world--if the will is not there to apply the law, problems will continue. This has been exemplified most recently after assistant secretary for consular affairs Mary Ryan was ousted in August after the Visa Express story broke. The best the State Department could come up with as a replacement for Mary Ryan was her protegee Moira Hardy, who had served as her deputy for many years and was, I understand, instrumental in setting up the Visa Express program. This is the person the State Department is putting forth to head consular affairs in the wake of 9/11.

The only conclusion I see here is that the State Department is not fit to handle the visa function, because it has conflicting priorities, and that it should focus on diplomacy and leave the visa issuance function to a new entity, or perhaps an existing entity, I leave that to the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. A visa officer should be first and foremost a national security law enforcement officer, with important but secondary public diplomacy and courtesy considerations. Unlike the current situation where consular officers are fundamentally public affairs officers with those pesky, inconvenient law enforcement responsibilities.

The State Department has been clamoring, for as far back as I can remember, for more resources, more money. Now, since 9/11 there have been more resources. There are new security forms that certain target groups need to fill out. There is much more information on CLASS (Consular Lookout and Security System), which is the terrorist background check. But the will has not changed.

The Visa Express program continued for almost one year after 9/11 and was only terminated because it caused morale problems at the embassy because it looked bad. Not because it had let terrorists in and not because it was rolling out the red carpet for potential future terrorists. In a recent letter to the Justice Department, the State Department essentially said that simply the presumption that an applicant might potentially have terrorist ties was not sufficient reason to deny a visa, and that the State Department needed hard proof.

In the private sector, if you lose a million-dollar sale, you lose the contract, you lose your job, you lose the bonus. In the State Department, if you systematically issue bad visas, you get a $15,000 bonus.

I don't think anything is going to change until a clear signal is sent. And with all due respect to Joel Mowbray and National Review and all the superb work they're doing, just exposing these problems is not going to be sufficient. If there are no consequences, if the incentive structure is not changed, if there is no punishment for bad actions that helped facilitate the deaths of thousands of our compatriots, nothing is going to change.

Michelle Malkin

In the same manner that the State Department and its consular officers ignored all of these omissions and non sequiturs and misspellings and lack of clarity and completion, the Immigration and Naturalization Service did the same thing at their ports of entry, which is really the last line of defense before these foreign terrorist infiltrators come into our country.

The I-94 form, which is the INS's tracking record issued to all foreign visitors, requires applicants to provide complete, truthful, and legible information about where they will stay in the U.S. during their visit and what they're going to do here. Like the State Department, the INS overlooked incomplete paperwork.

Joel Mowbray's reporting and Nikolai Wenzel's firsthand experience, and the research I did for my book, lead us to very similar conclusions: Our immigration system is incapable of doing its job. Whether you're talking about those negligent consular officers overseas, about our porous air, land, and sea ports of entry, or about our ineffective detention and deportation policies, our federal immigration authorities have failed at every level to provide for the common defense.

Where we need to start to win the war on terror is very similar to the "broken windows" approach to crime control. When you focus on the little things, as they did in New York City, fixing windows, cleaning up graffiti, paying attention to the subway fare jumpers, you can turn around a ship that is sinking. I think it's the same way with immigration policy. We need to fix and repair our broken fences: from guarding the front door and fixing the holes in the screen doors at our consular offices overseas, to locking the back door with regard to illegal immigration, and the side door that allows so many known and suspected terrorists to cycle through our system, as well as other foreign menaces and criminals. That will help us get control of what is essentially a state of immigration anarchy.

The State Department and the INS are the first and last lines of defense in protecting Americans from those who would come to our shores to do us harm. It's about time that they did their jobs. Very simply, they should start by enforcing the laws that are already on the books.

The Islamization of Europe
By Jane Barnes Mack-Cozzo

When it comes to immigration, Patrick Buchanan has an ally of sorts in Germany. Bassam Tibi, Professor of International Relations at the University of Goettingen, has been speaking out for a long time on the perils of excessive immigration into Europe. Sharing many of the same general concerns as Buchanan, he has expressed particular reservations about Muslim immigrants. What makes Professor Tibi's observations especially poignant is that he is Syrian-born, and a published authority on Islamic religion and culture.

Tibi describes two parallel Islamic communities in Europe. There are the non-orthodox Muslims who are educated and professionally successful. They have integrated and pose no problem. There are also those Muslims, however, who are part of the "mosque community." They defend another culture and reject integration because they don't reconcile democracy and constitutional law with their religion. Rather, they read in German translation the texts of Sayyid Qutb, the father of Islamic fundamentalism. This is the segment threatening the "Islamization" of Europe.

While Tibi acknowledges that Europe needs immigrants, he also believes that countries have the right to choose whom to let in. He believes it imperative to stop Islamic fundamentalists from finding refuge in the West, especially in Europe, where they pursue their anti-democratic activities and build up the logistics to promote them.

Hezbollah wants to establish central headquarters for European "operations" in Berlin. It also has been widely published that the terrorist group is beginning tactical cooperation with al- Qaeda. Hamas has already built up its logistical base in Germany. These developments took place after 9/11.

The financial benefits of European welfare perks, which have continued to expand unabated, help these immigrants build a cultural diaspora, which becomes a recruiting ground for Islamic fundamentalists. The Danish minister for integration acknowledged that there is no incentive for immigrants to work when they sometimes get more money from welfare than the gainfully employed. These benefits include not only unemployment compensation and social security but also generous housing, transportation, and day care allowances, to name but a few.

Europe's relaxed borders and loose immigration policy enable hundreds of al-Qaeda killers to trickle in and apply for asylum. Ramzi Binalshibh, a possible September 11 "twentieth hijacker," applied for political asylum in Germany under a false name in 1995. The application was denied, but later he reapplied under his real name and was granted a visa.

To counter this threat, Professor Tibi asserts that Western Europe needs not only border police, but also stricter legislation regarding so-called refugees. The U.K., Denmark, and the Netherlands have been in the process of laying the groundwork for such legislation.

And not a moment too soon. If current immigration patterns continue, Denmark will most likely be 33 percent Muslim by 2040. The U.K. can expect an increase of more than 2 million immigrants over the next decade. Conservative estimates put the number of illegal immigrants into the country at approximately 250,000 a year. Indeed, in the U.K. only 11,500 of the annual 50,000-60,000 asylum applicants are turned down. In July 2002, the British government sought to reduce the number of asylum seekers by barring them from employment while their applications were being processed. But if these applications aren't processed within six months, the asylum seekers are allowed to work anyway.

Those refugees who apply for asylum should have to prove that they are indeed political refugees. Asylum would then not be an instrument so easily misused for illegal or illegitimate immigration. This is not, as Europe's leftists maintain, a manifestation of a "Fortress Europe" but necessary political control of immigration.

The alternative is an Islamic diaspora in which Muslim fundamentalists denounce the freedoms of democracy while using them for their own purposes. A suspected al-Qaeda accomplice remarked that he had "trust in the German legal system." No wonder! Not long ago in Hamburg, leading Islamic fundamentalists who had been arrested were then released on the same day, without so much as being charged.

The mosque communities also use accusations of Western persecution for their own purposes. The label "Islamophobic" is compared propagandistically to anti-Semitism. Yet many Muslims are anti-Semitic themselves. In August 2002, a Muslim group in Denmark announced that a $30,000 bounty would be paid for the murder of several prominent Danish Jews. Indeed, Muslim violence strikes fear in Denmark's 6,000 Jews, causing them to rely increasingly on police protection.

While Professor Tibi believes that genuine integration is the only solution to the problem of Islamization, he calls attention to an important distinction between the German words Einwanderung and Zuwanderung. Both connote immigration, but the former suggests institutionally regulated migration and, by extension, integration. The latter is unregulated: Immigration is random and uncontrolled and no integration occurs. This is the form that now prevails.

German politicians believe that integration will happen if immigrants are given language lessons at a total cost of $250,000,000. But if these same immigrants are not predisposed to integrate, the point is moot. Mohamed Atta's German language ability did not seem to inspire him to do so.

These same politicians also maintain that instruction in Islamic religion contributes to integration. The extremist Islamic Federation of Berlin is now allowed to teach fundamentalist doctrine to Muslim children born in Germany. A leading Islamic cleric, Abu al-Alaak Maududi, tells his followers that "secular democracy is in every way contradictory to your religion and beliefs. The Islam in which you believe and after which you call yourselves Muslims, is completely different from this hateful system... Islam and democracy are diametrically opposed." Several Muslim leaders call openly for the introduction of sharia in Europe as soon as the Muslim population increases enough to enforce the archaic Islamic law. Given present immigration patterns, this won't take long. In 1996, an Islamic leader in the U.K. warned that Muslims "may seek to change the existing political, legal, and educational structures to conform to Islamic norms." Europeans seem to have forgotten that the migration of a Syrian Muslim to Spain resulted in almost 800 years of Islamic rule.

They also don't seem to understand that throughout history there always has been a tension between Europe and the Islamic world, marked especially by the clash of the Crusades and jihad. The 9/11 terrorists were inextricably linked to this conflict. Although we must differentiate between Islamic civilization and Islamic fundamentalism, a real dialogue that addresses both issues has yet to take place. As Patrick Buchanan points out, immigration itself merits debate. Yet that debate is prohibited by the forces of political correctness. As Professor Tibi explains, Western countries focus on a "multi-culti" communitarianism, which leads to blind cultural relativism.

Years ago, Muslims in Birmingham, England voiced objection to the singing of Christmas carols in a local school. The English reaction consisted of a pathetic plea for "interfaith understanding and tolerance" rather than righteous indignation. In France, the Mitterand government compensated the families of Muslim juvenile delinquents because remuneration was believed to negate the poverty that supposedly creates religious fundamentalism.

There are similar mindsets among large groups of Americans. The West suffers from cultural denial borne of misplaced guilt. This has fostered an identity crisis which prevents the promotion, let alone defense, of its classical values. As a result, the culture has lost its raison d'etre.

In short, the West is committing suicide.

--Jane Barnes Mack-Cozzo, professor of American culture at Japanese universities for 12 years, now divides her time between California and Germany.